Gargoyle

The gargoyle is an enemy in Heretic. It is a small creature with red skin, two wings, a tail, a pair of arms and legs with sharp claws. It has two horns on its head, a mouth with teeth, and a pair of yellow eyes. There is also a special variant called the fire gargoyle, which looks exactly the same. Regular or fire gargoyles appear in every level of Heretic, with the exception of.

Description of the gargoyle from the manual: Half-demon and half-bat, these wicked red beasts are the Order's guard dogs of the sky.

Description of the fire gargoyle from the manual: As if flying demons weren't enough, Fire Gargoyles toss balls of fire down on their unsuspecting enemy.

Combat characteristics
Both types of gargoyles can hover in the air and fly around the map. Their difference lies in the type of the attack they use: regular gargoyles only have a melee attack, while fire gargoyles only have a ranged attack.

Regular gargoyles slash at the player with their claws at close range and can dive at the player from range to quickly close the distance. They have 40 hit points, making them the weakest enemy in Heretic after the chicken. Unlike the lost soul in Doom, the impact of a gargoyle's swoop will make Corvus grunt, but does not actually injure him; only when the gargoyle starts clawing the damage will be inflicted.

The fire gargoyles will instead throw small fireballs at the player, lacking both the swoop and the melee attack. They also have 80 hit points, the same as the regular golem.

Tactical analysis
Gargoyles are smaller than other bad guys making them harder to hit. The ability to fly and their small size grants them a high level of mobility and ability to access small areas.

Both types of gargoyle look exactly alike, but can be identified by observing their attack behavior at range: those that swoop in at the player are always the regular variety, while fire gargoyles will hang back and throw projectiles.

While gargoyles may be easy to dispatch individually, with a single point-blank blast of the Ethereal Crossbow killing the regular variety most of the time, they often appear in large groups where they can potentially overwhelm the player. When encountered in smaller groups, even the Elven Wand is generally sufficient. The Gauntlets of the Necromancer are also very effective when facing small groups of gargoyles in tight spaces and allow the player to conserve ammo.

The two varieties of gargoyle will infight each other, but regular gargoyles ignore the swoop impact of their brethren.

The projectiles of fire gargoyles will be moved by wind.

Data

 * 1) These tables assume that all calls to P_Random for damage, pain chance, impact animations, backfire checks, and smoke trails are consecutive. In real play, this is never the case: counterattacks and AI pathfinding must be handled, and of course the map may contain additional moving monsters and other randomized phenomena (such as flickering lights). Any resulting errors are probably toward the single-shot average, as they introduce noise into the correlation between the indices of "consecutive" calls.
 * 2) Fire Gargoyles are immune to each others fireballs and hence can not damage each other excepting indirect damage caused by exploding puff pods.

Appearance statistics
In the IWADs the gargoyle is first encountered on these maps per skill level:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of gargoyles per skill level:

The fire gargoyle is first encountered on these maps:

The IWADs contain the following numbers of fire gargoyles:

Bugs
The gargoyle's "crash" animation is subject to several bugs which can either cause it to fail to gib or to gib multiple times when it dies.

Other games
The afrit from Hexen is very similar in its role and appearance to the fire gargoyle. Instead of red, it has almost black skin and a fiery aura.

Hexen II also has a similar enemy called the fire imp.